From the Bottom Up: Building Community-Owned and -Operated Mesh Networks

Excerpt

This panel highlights the work of a few folks representing part of a broad, international movement consisting of network engineers, community change makers, researchers, architects, and thinkers who are building decentralized and autonomous communications infrastructure. We know that the Internet is deeply broken, and we are rebuilding, from the inside out. We mitigate the ills of interception and interference on the net by facilitating networks that are owned, operated, and governed by the people that use them.

Description

Anthropologically speaking, the emergence of hacker culture and the subsequent spawn of hackerspaces worldwide is a natural response to the damaging effects of neoliberalism and globalization – toward commons-based peer production and DIY engineering. A bottom-up approach to taking back the means of production by which we communicate is to co-create alternatives to the incumbent systems of power. This panel will examine the role of local community-based organizations in building community-owned and -operated networks by sharing stories and case studies from community networks around the world.

Sudo Mesh, an organization helping to build the People’s Open Network in Oakland, California, operates out of the local hackerspace Sudo Room. They are currently testing their first batch of nodes running custom firmware built on open source software, and building partnerships with local organizations..

wlan-slovenija is the open wireless network of Slovenia, connecting homes across the country with some of the first international links (to Croatia and Austria). They’ve built great tools such as tunneldigger for VPN connections and nodewatcher for monitoring nodes in a network.

The Kansas City Freedom Network has been put together to begin bridging the digital divide by developming a community network designed to provide low cost services to businesses and residents of the 18th and Vine district and multiple locations in KC.

[Other networks participating in the panel to be announced asap]

Tags

Speaking experience

Jenny Ryan has given talks and presentations and led collaborative workshops for the past 7 years. Most recently, she participated in a panel on Women and Community Wireless and led a collaborative workshop on coalition-building at the 2013 International Summit for Community Wireless Networks in Berlin.

[Other speakers to be announced asap]

Speakers

Biography

Co-founded hackerspaces and citizen science labs in Copenhagen (Labitat, BiologiGaragen) and Oakland (sudo room, Counter Culture Labs). Background in IT engineering and synthetic biology. Currently hacking full time on various open software/hardware/wetware projects including sudo mesh / peoplesopen.net and the Real Vegan Cheese project at Counter Culture Labs.

This panel highlights the work of a few folks representing part of a broad, international movement consisting of network engineers, community change makers, researchers, architects, and thinkers who are building decentralized and autonomous communications infrastructure. We know that the Internet is deeply broken, and we are rebuilding, from the inside out. We mitigate the ills of interception and interference on the net by facilitating networks that are owned, operated, and governed by the people that use them.

Biography

I am currently a PhD student at UC Berkeley working on a collaborative reading platform called PeerLibrary. In the past I helped bootstrap wlan slovenija, open wireless network of Slovenia, and helped develop software to grow and maintain such a network, nodewatcher.

This panel highlights the work of a few folks representing part of a broad, international movement consisting of network engineers, community change makers, researchers, architects, and thinkers who are building decentralized and autonomous communications infrastructure. We know that the Internet is deeply broken, and we are rebuilding, from the inside out. We mitigate the ills of interception and interference on the net by facilitating networks that are owned, operated, and governed by the people that use them.

Biography

Jenny’s mission is to work alongside existing and emerging organizations to build human and communications infrastructure, connecting grassroots communities and global initiatives rooted in the shared struggle to reclaim the commons, create public spheres through the cultivation of open spaces, and enable direct democracy through principles of federation and open source or Read/Write culture.

Current projects focus around building a community-owned mesh network in the East Bay [The People’s Open Network/Sudo Mesh], helping to organize an emerging Oakland hackerspace (Sudo Room), designing a decentralized platform for coordinating objects, projects and people [Mycelia], and related efforts to map out and coordinate collaborative spaces and cooperative economies.

This panel highlights the work of a few folks representing part of a broad, international movement consisting of network engineers, community change makers, researchers, architects, and thinkers who are building decentralized and autonomous communications infrastructure. We know that the Internet is deeply broken, and we are rebuilding, from the inside out. We mitigate the ills of interception and interference on the net by facilitating networks that are owned, operated, and governed by the people that use them.

Biography

President of the Personal Telco Project, a non-profit dedicated to the idea that networks should be operated in the interests of their users. Russell is a long-time research programmer, more recent embedded Linux person, and long-time Linux user and developer. Long enough to remember a (brief) time when the kernel was compiled with g++.

This panel highlights the work of a few folks representing part of a broad, international movement consisting of network engineers, community change makers, researchers, architects, and thinkers who are building decentralized and autonomous communications infrastructure. We know that the Internet is deeply broken, and we are rebuilding, from the inside out. We mitigate the ills of interception and interference on the net by facilitating networks that are owned, operated, and governed by the people that use them.